Stories from the Library: The Mirror of the Moon

In July 1969, Octavia E. Butler watched the Apollo 11 landing on television and logged it in a notebook: the times, the data, and Neil Armstrong's first words from the surface. That notebook is here, and her later Parable novels open on July 20, the date of the landing.

You walk into the room at the other end of the story. Galileo's Sidereus nuncius of 1610, the book that reported craters and mountains on a moon everyone thought was smooth, comes first, beside a model of Kepler's two-lens telescope. The rest takes in eclipse predictions in a 1476 calendar, prints from the Paris Observatory's photographic atlas of the moon, Apollo planning material and a 1992 NASA mosaic of the lunar north pole.

It is one gallery of rare books, manuscripts and photographs, with a companion playlist on Spotify. Find it in the Focus Gallery on the Huntington Art Gallery's second floor. The Huntington is closed on Tuesdays, and the show closes on 30 November.